Life and Existence

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm, a state of intellectual magnificence which we must safeguard like a treasure, not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words and inexact, pedantic arguments.

It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life. . . . But what is that something?

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell. . . . You enterprised a railroad . . . you blasted its rocks away. . . . And now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.

Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven. . . . To set your words against the Words of God.

To be born again . . . first you have to die.

I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact.

I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact.

I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.

Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.

[ Contrasting writers in the United States and in Eastern Europe :] In my situation, everything goes and nothing matters; in their situation, nothing goes and everything matters.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted—in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest . . . of his head.

Modern complexities call also for a constant infusion of new blood in the courts, just as it is needed in executive functions of the Government and in private business. A lowered mental or physical vigor leads men to avoid an examination of complicated and changed conditions. Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or to inquire into the present or the future.

[ On the “court-packing plan” increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices :] This plan will save our national Constitution from hardening of the judicial arteries.

The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.